1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for staging a file within a distributed computing system.
2. Description Of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas in which progress has been made is in distributed computing systems. Distributed computing systems may include a large number of computers at varying network locations. From time to time files must be downloaded to all or some of the computers that make up the distributed computing system. Files that are downloaded by multiple computers in the distributed computing system are typically cached on file servers or applications for later download by the computers. Currently, system administrators stage files in specific servers within a distributed computing system manually. The staging of files in this manner may include administrators attempting to guess which servers would be best to populate with the files. Alternatively administrators may choose to stage files on all available servers. Either manner of staging the files is inefficient; one manner includes a manual choice of file servers that may or may not be the best choice while the other manner includes over-deployment of the files to many servers that be used only be a few computers. Currently, there is no automated method of staging a file in a distributed computing system that takes into account the identification of the clients that will be downloading the file; the network location of each client that will be downloading the file; the network location of each server; and the number of clients that will be downloading the file from each server.